


Face the Light

by cat_77



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Headaches & Migraines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1837042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cat_77/pseuds/cat_77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye thought getting hit by the alien gun-thing sucked, but the aftermath may well be worse.  Then again, maybe not?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Face the Light

**Author's Note:**

> For the "headaches/migraines" square at hc_bingo.
> 
> * * *

She remembered the light. It was bright, way too bright, and felt like it was actively trying to burn holes into her retinas. She remembered the way it wavered and waved and made her vision as a whole shimmy and shake and turn an odd sort of gray at the edges before it went to complete black. She remembered the noise, high-pitched and piercing, and the way it felt like icepicks stabbing through her ears and right into her brain. She remembered how, when combined, it really and truly sucked like a giant sucking thing.

She was expecting the suck to continue even now, even as some part of her reasoned it clearly didn’t because she could think clearly enough to reason out why it should. The noise was gone, which was frankly awesome. She kind of heard a hint of something in the background, but she wasn’t fully tracking yet and she couldn’t make out anything beyond the fact that it was far too loud for as much as she couldn’t really hear it.

She opened her eyes, just a sliver, just a flutter of her eyelashes. The brightness dove in again and she squeezed them shut as the pain ratcheted up another notch. There was a harsh gurgle of a noise that she was ashamed to say was probably her, and she pulled at the cloth that lay atop her as if that would protect her from it, even as it was scratchy and harsh against her skin, even as the scent of the detergent it had been washed in, the plastic it had been stored in, threatened to suffocate her.

“Shh...” a voice said, way too close and way too loud. It was female, familiar, and totally unrecognizable. “It’s going to be okay. We’ve got you; we’re going to take care of you.” The voice said her name, the name she gave to herself, and that somehow brought her comfort more than any other words.

There was a cool pressure in her arm, right around the pinprick of pain, and then there really was not a whole lot more. She found she was okay with that, that she fully supported that plan and would lead the charge even as that charge was into welcoming darkness.

When she next dared to come back to consciousness, she found the noise was non-existent, which frankly scared the crap out of her. She opened her eyes far too quickly and winced in anticipation of what would happen, only to find that, once again, there was nothing.

Okay, so not really nothing. The lights were dimmed to just the emergency levels and even those seemed muted. Above her head and draped in a cloth was the glowing readout of whatever they were still pumping into her system. It was just enough for her to realize she was in one of the medical pods with even the lights in the hallway outside turned down to pretty much nothing. Frightening, really. Like an eight or nine on the Freaky Scale, but seriously tolerable after what she was assuming was the last few hours.

She tugged on the thin blanket, happy when it felt more like cardboard than sandpaper against her skin, and tried to get her bearings without actually moving that much if she didn’t actually need to. 

She was dizzy and tired but the vast majority of the pain was gone. There was an IV bag hanging from its little hook that was mostly empty which made since because her bladder felt mostly full. There was still a light haze around everything, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the initial suck or the drugs she clearly had been given to combat the suck. She shifted her feet beneath the blanket and heard her heels dig against the mattress with a sound that was still not quite right but a lot better than the oh so very wrong.

There was a hush of noise from her side, and she turned to see the door slide open, smooth and easy instead of the usual hint of grating. She narrowed her eyes at the floor behind it before it slid shut again and saw one of the tool kits left there and guessed someone had finally graphited the crap out of the thing.

“Are you feeling any better?” Jemma asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper, familiar now from earlier despite the strangeness of it then.

“My head feels like I got brained by an alien blaster, but I don’t think I’m going to puke at the drop of a hat, so we’ll call it a win,” she replied. She shifted in the uncomfortable bed and the small room seemed to spin for a moment, making her rethink the puking comment. Once it steadied, she asked, “What happened?”

“You got brained by an alien blaster,” Jemma said with only a hint of a forced smile. A real one made it through when she explained, “That’s our best guess, anyway. Alien tech was used on alien tech and you were within the reaction zone. We found you, not unresponsive but definitely hypersensitive to multiple stimuli.”

It was coming back to her now, at least pieces of it. Hidden base, weird readings, alien glowing bug things, alien awesome pistol things, alien going boom things. She tried to focus on the still slightly blurry woman at the edge of her bed and guessed, “Glow bugs?”

Jemma huffed a laugh. “Agent Triplett called them that as well.” Her gaze turned to her scientific, I-have-something-new-to-poke-at contemplative look and she said, “They were actually cybernetic in origin, or at least that’s what we’ve found so far. There are hints of organic matter, woven within the control system or perhaps the control system itself, which dictates some sort of guided life form or system and...”

“Simmons?” Skye tried, calling her back to the present with a snap of her fingers. The feeling of skin on skin hurt, but not quite as much as the noise it produced. Satisfied she had her friend’s attention again, she guessed, “Alien gun on alien glow bug made boom, I got caught in boom?”

She nodded, and agreed, “The cascade of light and sound overwhelmed your system. None of the standard analgesics worked at first, until we decided to treat it like a migraine of sorts, just an alien-induced one. Fluids, antihistamines, nueroblockers, and general painkillers.”

Skye winced. “Yeah, haven’t had one of those for a while.” She paused because it didn’t sound quite right and Jemma was looking at her funny. “Well, never had an alien-induced one, but you know what I mean.”

Nope, still getting the look. Hands on hips now with narrowed eyes. Jemma was pissed and Skye wasn’t exactly sure why but was fairly certain she was about to find out. “'A while?'” she asked and Skye could hear the quotation marks. She was so not ready to deal with this, not while still rolling with whatever they pumped her full of and still reliving the vivid memory of suck. She waited, hoping for a pass and knowing she wouldn’t get one, especially when Jemma prompted, “And just how long is 'a while' in the land of Skye?”

“A couple of months?” she tried, and the wince was totally not fake.

“A couple – You’ve been here, on this team, for a year! And you didn’t think this was medically appropriate to share?” Jemma ranted and, yeah, okay, that came with a side of pain.

Salvation arrived in the form of a dark head peeking through the doorway. “Everything okay in here, ladies?” Trip asked in the way that implied he knew it wasn’t. He looked over to the bed and smiled, “Good to see you conscious again. I take it regular voices are good to go? Or do we need to find a volume switch for the good doctor?”

“Regular voices still suck, but not as much as they did,” she admitted. She wondered how bad she looked. She had a vague feeling that her hair was stuck to the side of her face, possibly with dried drool, but beyond that she had no clue. “As for the good doctor...”

Simmons cut her off though, thankfully at a slightly lower volume than before even if the pitch was still a bit on the shrill side. “The 'good doctor' just discovered that the 'less than good patient' has been keeping medically relevant information from her. For a YEAR.”

“Side effect of the serum? No, wait, that’s less than a year, some sort of reaction thing?” Trip guessed. He looked both puzzled and concerned at the same time, which is probably what broke Skye before Simmons could go off again.

“Migraines. They suck. I don’t have a lot of triggers, but when they hit, it’s duck and cover time,” she explained. It wasn't quite that simple, but she figured they'd give her a break on the specifics for now what with being on the tail end of one.

“Duck as in away from everything and cover as in from the lights?” Trip asked understandingly. Simmons turned to glare at him, but couldn’t go through with it, especially when he said, “Granma used to get them. Didn’t have the good stuff we have now, so we tried everything else: teas, ginger and honey, cold compresses, hot compresses, you name it. Some of the times it worked, some of the times it didn’t.”

“Yeah, try living in a van with no medical insurance - suck is an understatement,” Skye agreed. “Had contacts that would get me some stuff, but if I ran out, I ran out.”

Antoine blinked. “You lived in a van?”

She nodded, then pressed her head back against the flat pillow when she decided that was a bad idea. She forgot he hadn't been there for the whole introduction to the world of espionage and that he was a nice enough guy not to snoop and pry without a damn good reason. She hadn't given him a reason yet, or apparently a full backstory. She'd have to get around to that, likely soon. “It was a nice van, quiet van, portable van that could be moved to a parking ramp with the shades drawn so I could sleep it off without getting tagged.”

He leaned against the doorway and nodded as though that was perfectly reasonable, yet another thing she liked about their recent addition. “What happened to it?”

“SHIELD, or should I say Hydra. Probably destroyed by now,” she said, and felt a little sadness at the loss.

“But you have not been bound to your van for well over the 'few months' since your last attack,” Jemma pointed out because there was no way to avoid her, not when she had sunk her teeth into something. “What did you do then, steal supplies, pretend it was a hangover?”

“Slept in my bunk after taking a crap ton of Tylenol,” Skye admitted. It was quiet there, kind of. Dark when you turned off the lights and pulled anything resembling a shade. 

“Was that after the Atlanta incident?” Trip guessed.

She avoided nodding, barely. “The heat and the sun and the blah. Drank water, took meds, slept for like a day and a half and no one noticed because we all needed the break. It was kind of awesome except for the puking part.”

He made a face at that, but stepped closer, even put a hand on hers all reassuring like she was sure Jemma was meaning to be but was coming across more shrill and, yeah, definitely concerned, but also in lecture mode. “You’re not in the van anymore, you know that, right?”

She rolled her eyes and that was almost as bad of an idea as shaking her head. “Figured that out with the secret bases and high-tech plane, but thanks for the pointer,” she said glibly.

He chuckled, no offense taken, which was good because her words were not exactly being watched as they tumbled from her mouth. Yeah, she was on the good meds. “What I mean is, you are not alone. You can tell us and we can help.” He glanced at Simmons and said, “In fact, I’d say we’d be glad to.”

Jemma frowned, but laid her own hand down and said, “We want you to be well, in all senses of the word. If you are sick, or in pain, or injured in any way, you need to tell us. There might be something we can do that you haven’t thought of yet.” Then after a pause, because it was Jemma after all, she added, “But feel free to go to Coulson if you need to vomit.”

“No lectures?” Skye asked hopefully.

Jemma snorted, and not delicately. “Oh, there will be lectures, but they will wait until you are well enough for them to stick,” she promised. “Things like taking care of yourself and listing all your known triggers and what you do to stop them from coming on and what you’ve tried in the past and what you are willing to try now and possibly a full brain scan and-”

“And we care,” Trip summed it up for her. “All of us. All the time. Vomit and all.”

“You say that now,” she warned around a yawn.

Jemma smoothed back her hair and Antoine tucked the blanket just right. “Get some rest,” Jemma told her. “We have a lot to discuss when you’re feeling better. Perhaps with charts and spreadsheets.”

Trip patted her on the shoulder and then took Jemma by hers to lead her out. The door snicked shut and Skye was left alone again, but not really. She knew her team was out there, she knew her team was going to look out for her, even in this. She still wondered if she’d be able to sneak out both to the bathroom and to her own little cubby of a bunk where she could lock the doors to at least slow them down. She looked to the door to find Jemma standing there shaking her head, and the shadows of others passing even though they had no reason to be in this particular corridor at this particular time of night. 

All in all, she figured there could be far worse fates.

 

End.


End file.
